The Name of the Rose revisited

 

Just before the fiery climax of Jean-Jacques Annaud's 1986 film The Name of the Rose, the free-thinking monk and detective William of Baskerville (Sean Connery) pursues a murderous Benedictine friar into the labyrinthine stacks of a great Italian monastery's library.

The design of the library, in keeping with Umberto Eco's historical novel of the same name, is a metaphor for the inaccessibility of knowledge during the Medieval Inquisition.

As we discover during the course of the film, monks in the abbey's scriptorium were copying by hand authorized texts, mostly religious but not all. William and his young novice Adso (a youthful Christian Slater) examine some of the books and find randy brothers have illuminated the pages with vulgar drawings of the pope and other iconic church figures, perhaps to relieve boredom or push back against the stifling oppressiveness of dogmatism, convinced the books would be shelved and never seen again. At least, that was my take.

The picture's visual elements and ideas captured my imagination -- I had already read Eco's bestseller -- and I took to heart the story's message about the perils of rigid orthodoxy.

I came to the book and the movie primed for its messages. As a child, growing up on a college campus, I spent hours after school roaming the stacks of the college's library. It was, to misapply Hemingway, a "clean, well-lighted place," open in all aspects.

I loved its accessibility. I could enter the stacks by way of a spiraling staircase, an enclosed stairwell, or the elevator. I could go anywhere. Take down any book. Park my skinny behind in any empty chair and study pages to contentedness.

I discovered the children's literature room, basement level, and made friends with Huck and Tom and Homer Price. Thick anthologies held works by Rudyard and Langston; I read them repeatedly. I eventually got my own borrower's card and could bring friends home.

If we are all formations of our past choices and experiences, as the Buddhists contend, then I would like to think I am who I am because fetters were never placed on my mind. Sure, like many young people reared by healthy folks, I was counseled and directed but I was never restricted. As a result, I live a "go-see life" in a "go-see world."

What a terrific gift that is to give someone.

Avatar Teen Speak

 

Teen Speak has taken an interesting turn in entertainment media of late -- or perhaps I'm just now hearing it.

At some point, adolescent male dialogue in television and film morphed into a hybrid of urban homie / surfer dude / military grunt, even in programs created in non-American, English-speaking countries or set in extraterrestrial space in some future millennia, like the just-released Avatar: The Way of Water.

It's all "xxxx, dude" or "dude, xxxx." Every close male companion is a "bro." Things are "sick," "hot," or "lame." This gives the young folks an air of undisciplined cockiness, wholly unreliable and frequent embarrassments to their families.

One of the central subplots of James Cameron's latest epic adventure is the relationship between the film's hero, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a former Marine whose consciousness has been inserted into a 10-foot-tall, blue avatar living on the planet Pandora, home of such beings.

While leading a group that is trying to turn back colonization by Earthlings, Sully and his wife, Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), are parents to four children; the two older being boys, Neteyam and Lo'ak, Sully is raising as if they were Marine recruits. The younger wants especially desperately to win his father's praise. (Yes, a familiar plot device.)

Also a frequent visitor in the household is a human child called Spider, who was fathered and abandoned by Sully's sworn enemy, a Marine colonel named Quaritch (Stephen Lang). Sully's empathic older daughter, Tsireya, has a special attraction to Spider, even though he's shorter than she and not the same color. Interesting commentary, that.

The native Padorans like Neytiri speak a native tongue (some alien language concocted by Cameron, no doubt), and their English has a tropical islander lilt; they sound like Tahitians. This gives the threat of invasion and colonization a familiar ring.

The different speech patterns also represent generational differences, the clash between old ways and new. But at several important moments in the film, it's the children who lead, over their parents' objections and fears. Their dynamic heroism has been instilled in them by their elders and leads Sully to say with contrition to his younger son, "I see you."

It's a powerful moment.

Avatar: The Way of Water

James Cameron's Avatar: The Way of Water works so well because the cinematic epicist knows how to properly stack threat, disaster, recovery, family, chaos, tragedy, romance, vengence, suffering and sacrifice in the right order and in the right amounts. No one does it better, IMO.

Cameron knows how to please an audience, as evidenced by the film's opening weekend take, which doubled its $250 million production budget. Every penny is on the screen in brilliant, spectacular color with sequences of aerial and aquatic flight that beg for VR expansion (no doubt, already in the works).

Few directors are more assured in the realization of imagined worlds. His arboreal paradise, Pandora (introduced in the 2009 original Avatar), is expanded in this sequel to include a fantastic region of island villages, home to breathtaking animal and plant life and people committed to peacefully co-exist with the world around them.

It is there among the water people where genetically modified Marine Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and his wife Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña), both heralded Na'vi warriors among the blue-skinned giants, take refuge with their children after "Sky People" come looking for Sully, whom they believe is the leader of insurgents trying to turn back attempts to settle and claim Pandora for a dying Earth.

Cameron is not one to create new narrative themes; he's no philosopher. He's an exacting craftsman, a technician, who takes the familiar -- heroism, love, trust, disappointment, pride, hate -- and repackages them in fabulous ways. Audiences will recognize (and welcome warmly, I trust) the film's messages about community and duty, female empowerment and evironmental protection, obligation and loss.

Those familiar with Cameron's filmography know that a rogue and compromised military officer is one of his favorite villains, and Stephen Lang as Colonel Quaritch more than fills the bill as the expedition leader looking to take Sully, dead or alive, preferably the latter. The extended battle between Sully and Quaritch, that closes the film, sets up the inevitable third round of Avatar, release date December 2024. 

Babylon

 

Damien Chazelle's Babylon is cinematographically so sophisticated that quibbling about its unsatisfying narrative feels petty.

But maybe pointlessness is the intended big takeaway here. That is, the pointlessness of screen stardom and the industry that puts fiction and fantasy on film and hawks them like drugs to eager audiences.

Babylon lives up to its title by shellacking viewers with unbridled debauchery. A budget of $80 million can put a lot of flesh and fluids on the screen, and Chazelle, Oscar winner for 2016's La La Land, spares no expense in delivering what in the end is an epically excessive treatment of 1920s Hollywood excessiveness.

The color and music, flash and movement are riveting -- and exhausting -- but they don't actually enhance the intertwined stories of two ambitious factotums -- Margot Robbie and Diego Calva -- who find themselves at the right time, in the right place and willing to do whatever it takes to be a part of the big show.

For Robbie's Nellie LaRoy that means cocaine and booze, and Calva's Manny, shoveling tons of shit, sometimes literally, for studio executives. They both gain access, success and power, but as we've come to learn from the scores of other Tinsel Town Tales, all of this is as tenuous as the public's taste.

Brad Pitt stars as silent movie vet Jack Conrad who finds himself increasingly redundant in an industry that is changing faster than he is able or willing to. And Jovan Adepo (Fences) plays Black trumpeter and bandleader Sidney Palmer who gets a taste of fame and wealth only to have it soured by racism. Both of their storylines are interesting but underdeveloped, especially Palmer's.

Babylon runs a little more than three hours but feels more superfluous than bloated, more smart than cunning. Lovers of film will no doubt enjoy the movie's fascination with itself, its history and the names that made Hollywood what it is.

Only the most naive will be surprised that fortunes and lives were made and lost in La La Land, although all will certainly be impressed by Chazelle's wicked imagination and daring.

Triange of Sadness

 

The central characters in Swedish director Ruben Östlund's Triangle of Sadness are fashion model couple Carl and Yaya (Harris Dickson and Charlbi Dean, respectively) who take turns being insecure and insensitive in all of their photogenic self-regard.

In this widely celebrated film, we follow the couple through a gender-role meltdown at a Michelin restaurant, a gastrically disastrous cruise for the soulless super-rich that Yaya won as a social media influencer, and onto an island where the fortunes of the haves and have nots are reversed.

Carl and Yaya, whose only real values appear to be extrinsic, are tossed between warring classes, indulged and exploited by one another and the entitled, and ultimately, it appears, devoured by greed and circumstance.

It sounds bleak, but it's riotously funny, a pitch-black comedy of political and social upheaval, where none are worthy, but some are more unworthy than others.

The film also stars Woody Harrelson as the drunken, Marxist captain of a $250 million yacht, who despises the people to whom he is charged to give safe passage. He forms an interesting, and hilarious, friendship with a Russian oligarch (Zlatko Buric) who made his wealth peddling shit (fertilizer).

Not coincidentally they all find themselves at the mercy of head toilet cleaner Abigail (Dolly de Leon), who wields power with familiar ruthless self-interest.

Östlund's Triangle of Sadness is most certainly not for every taste, the extended scene of explosive seasickness might force some audience members out of the room, and it is not coy about its messaging, offering a wide variety of villains from which to choose. In that way, it is terribly refreshing.

Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody

 

Director Kasi Lemmons' Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody offers freshness to the now-familiar story of the very public rise and fall of the iconic pop singer (played with astounding energy and compassion by British actress Naomie Ackie), the tragedy of her descent into drug addiction, her troubled relationship with her father, John Houston (the reliable Clarke Peters of The Wire), and her husband, R&B singer Bobby Brown (played by Moonlight's Ashton Sanders), and the great loss her legion of fans still feel since her accidental drowning in 2012.

Houston's caring relationship with record executive Clive Davis (a wonderful Stanley Tucci) is well-documented, but Lemmons tills new ground in Houston's longstanding relationship with her female companion, Robyn Crawford (Nafessa Williams), which seemed to sustain Houston through some of her most challenging times, but which the singer made subordinate to her success, her marriage and her devotion to her outwardly moralistic but manipulative father and strict stage mother, recording artist Cissy Houston (Tamara Tunie).

Many will go to Lemmons' movie for the music -- understandably -- and they won't be disappointed. But Ackie's performance is so luminescent and assured that audiences initially interested only in the hits will surely be captivated by this young actress. She's marvelous!

Even a film of this length -- nearly 2.5 hours -- cannot be completely comprehensive with a life as complex as Houston's. This screenplay shows some narrative raggedness, its telescoping story is a bit disorienting, especially when players don't age appreciably over the course of the film.

But one thing is incontrovertible: the film's final scene -- the restaging of Houston's American Music Award performance in 1994 -- is riveting. Ackie's performance to Houston's voice track is so spot on that many are sure to study this sequence for years for its elegance and precision. It is fabulous and makes the pain of the loss even more acute.

Cab Train Rides

 

My latest obsession is watching cab view train rides on YouTube.

The concept is so simple that I feel a bit embarrassed that it holds such fascination for me.

A camera placed in the engineer's compartment of a train records the journey between cities in Europe (France, Germany, Switzerland, Scandinavia, among them), Asia, Australia, Africa and South America and some in the U.S., often going through deserts and mountainous regions, over vertiginous bridges and through pitch black tunnels.

There is no accompanying narration, just the muted natural sounds of the train pushing down the rails.

It's surprisingly calming and a bit hypnotic. The steady, forward movement, passing scenery, the feeling of being caught up in direction without clear purpose are intoxicating stress-reducers.

Village People

 

Shortly after finishing university, I moved into a mill village neighborhood in West Columbia with some friends, most of us recent USC graduates.

Some of our neighbors were long-time residents, some families stretching back to when the Columbia Mill on the canal was up and running.

One neighbor was a tiny widow-woman who reared two sons -- both auto mechanics and as big as oak trees. I'll call her Mrs. Smith.

Mrs. Smith worked in the Horsman Doll factory as a dresser, which is exactly what it sounds like. She put the clothes on the dolls after the plastic had been molded, cooled and painted, the hair woven into the heads and eyes popped into pouty faces.

Eight hours a day. Five days a week.

Mrs. Smith talked about her job with great pride and joy, as, I think, only those of her generation could.

Those who had known scarcity and insecurity and took nothing for granted.

I had moved out of the neighborhood by the time Horsman shuttered the plant in 1986, and I think Mrs. Smith had since retired.

She'd moved out of the village, selling the homestead to eager investors who predicted the area would eventually become a yuppie enclave, filled with people who knew little about Mrs. Smith's pride and joy or of the others who had lived there before.

Much to their loss.

God Forbid: The Sex Scandal That Brought Down a Dynasty

 

Documentarian Billy Corben's "God Forbid: The Sex Scandal That Brought Down a Dynasty" (Hulu) recounts the events that led to Jerry Falwell Jr's ousting as president of Liberty University, the largest Christian institution of higher education in the country.

It also draws clearly the connection between Falwell's escapades with wife Becki and a young Miami Beach pool attendant who became her lover and Falwell's protege and the ascendance of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States.

The film --which is maddeningly frustrating to me because of the obviousness of the Falwells' ploys -- prominently features Giancarlo Granda, the handsome "pool boy" who was swept into the Falwells' circle by Becki in 2012, while the couple were vacationing at a Miami resort. Granda and Becki Falwell would quickly become regular lovers, meeting in various locations around the country, with Falwell himself watching the two have sex.

The Falwells would soon be inviting Granda along on business meetings and to family gatherings, describing the young man, who was the same age as the Falwell's children, as someone Jerry Falwell was helping professionally. But the actual reason, Granda says, was to keep the young man close and controlled. This continued for several years.

It would all eventually blow up as Granda grew more and more uneasy as he watched Falwell's performances as the leader of evangelical Christians who had been activated politically by Falwell's father decades before. Granda tells of being troubled by Falwell's hypocrisy and how he, Granda, began to distance himself from the couple -- not altogether successfully.

It wasn't until the media started exploring possible impropriety with the Falwells that Jerry Falwell admitted that his wife had indeed had an affair with the "pool boy." Granda publicly retaliated after he was described by some as having targeted Falwell because of his position as a powerful evangelical leader. Telling his story wreaked havoc on the Falwells and their empire. But it also led to other reports of "unholy acts" at Liberty University.

The film also features comments from Granda's sister who was a close observer of the events in real time, investigative journalists and religion scholars add important layers of context to the now-familiar story.

To me, the film's greater value is as a reminder of the costs of blind faith on individuals and society and as a warning about the threat of all forms of radicalism on democracy.

T'Nia Miller

 

Amazon Prime's The Peripheral is a highly entertaining sci-fi series created from the 2014 William Gibson apocalyptic novel of the same name, but it is also a stellar example of diversity and inclusion in television and film.

This is particularly true in the casting of the Black British actress T'Nia Miller as the cold-blooded research institute leader Dr. Cherise Nuland, a woman of science so evil she can turn honeybees into killers to punish a disappointing subordinate.

The casting of Ms. Miller, who is openly lesbian, is one of those rare occasions when a Black female performer gets to play a scene-stealing villainous role that most often have gone to white men.

Ms. Miller, who has appeared primarily in British television series, takes the classic black-caped / moustache-twirling bad guy and turns him into a shaved-headed, bejeweled future-fashionista dominatrix who is as venomous and ruthless as any male actor might be -- and more than any Black woman has been allowed to be on film.

The character is a wonderfully refreshing and encouraging creation.

The Peripheral also stars Chloe Grace Moretz, Jack Reynor and Gary Carr.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

 

Marvel's original Black Panther film (2018) was unabashed in its politics. In it, director Ryan Coogler laid out for audiences a worldview that contrasted with the reality of the daily experiences of many -- especially people of color.

Empowerment and self-governance were at the heart of that movie's story of an isolated but technologically advanced African kingdom that eschewed the ways of the rest of the world -- for the most part -- to tend to its own people and grow its wealth, without interference from outsiders and colonizers.

Chadwick Boseman played the youthful king of Wakanda, T'Challa, who inherited the throne after his father's assassination and sought more openness for his nation’s borders. T'Challa ruled with wise moderation and defended the country from mortal threats in the guise of the costumed superhero Black Panther, his strength and agility enhanced by a mysterious elixir passed down through the generations.

Coogler's sequel, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, picks up a few years after the original. T'Challa has died from some unaccountable ailment, leaving the nation in the stewardship of his mother, Ramonda (a regal Angela Bassett) who is aided by her scientist daughter Shuri (the always-winning British actress Letitia Wright).

Ramonda's leadership is tested when Namor, the mutant leader of a vast underwater kingdom of blue beings (Mexican actor Tenoch Huerta) comes to Wakanda to warn of unwelcomed human intrusion into his water world. The surface people, mostly Americans, are searching for the same valuable substance that has given Wakanda its outsized standing among nations. Namor is himself not blue, but Brown, descended from the native people of the Yucatan.

The meeting between Ramonda and Namor and subsequent encounters lead to an ultimatum -- help Namor kill the intruders or suffer the same fate they will once Namor unleashes his warriors on the surface nations.

It will not be lost on astute observers that Coogler and his co-writer Joe Robert Cole are presenting a story in which the existentially marginalized are set against one another with the very likely outcome being the annihilation of all, thus leaving their wealth for other nations to plunder and their people to enslave.

Coogler's Wakanda Forever is most certainly an elegy to Boseman, who died of cancer two years ago but appears in a few tribute montages, but it is also, perhaps mainly, an affirming statement of the power of unity and grace in a world seemingly overrun with corruption and greed.

Letitia Wright

 

For Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Letitia Wright delivers a strong performance as an unconventional female character in a movie loaded with them.

Wright reprises the role of Shuri, the genius sister of the fallen Wakanda king and Black Panther, T'Challa (Chadwick Boseman), who eventually becomes queen and the Black Panther. Shuri is all science and swagger.

Shuri and Okoye (Danai Gurira), the leader of Wakanda's Dora Milaje, the all-female army, set off in search of the inventor of a device that locates the rare extraterrestrial element that is the source of Wakanda's power and wealth.

The inventor is Riri, a street-smart, "young, gifted and Black" female student at MIT (Dominique Thorne). She and Shuri bond immediately, recognizing kindred spirits. Riri, in her version of Iron Man flying armor, joins the Wakandans in a battle royale against a mortal threat from beneath the ocean.

Also joining the large cast is the fine British actress Michaela Coel as a headstrong member of the Dora Milaje, who becomes General Okoye's protege. A final montage near the film's close suggests she and another fierce Dora Milaje warrior Ayo (Florence Kasumba) are intimate companions.

What is to be made of all of this, aside from "Black Girl Magic" affirmations? Probably not much more since the film's narrative only hints at the psychological and emotional layers beneath the surface for these characters.

It is quite likely writer / director Ryan Coogler and the heads of Marvel Studios know Black Panter audiences will have little appetite for a full-blown exploration of non-binary relationships among these remarkable Black women.

And that's a pity.

As a postscript, Letitia Wright's performance as an emotionally arrested young gay woman in the 2015 British series Banana is a real treat, nuanced and heartrending.

The English

 

Two-thirds of the way through Hugo Blick's extraordinary miniseries The English (Amazon Prime), Emily Blunt, a relocated British aristocrat in the American West of the 1890s, exchanges memories of home with her Pawnee companion, played by Chaske Spencer.

Lady Cornelia shares that she can never leave the perilous killing and thieving of the American frontier for the comforts of her home in England, where she buried her teenaged son after their isolation and exile because of the circumstances of his birth. Her life there was ended, she tells her friend.

Eli, a former scout for the U.S. Calvary, is touched by Cornelia's painful resignation and offers that the locket she wears as a memento of her son IS her home, just like the family totem he carries with him. This, he tells her, allows them to find "home" where they might.

The two embrace, but Cornelia withdraws, running off and stripping down to her undergarments. She covers herself in prairie soil, in what appears to be an attempt at expiation.

It's an important scene that does not play out as viewers might expect. But that can be said for all of Blick's remarkable series. It is fresh and refreshing, and so much more than a conventional Western, with most of its exceptionalness coming from Blick's poetic storytelling and Blunt and Spencer's delivery. They are two souls bound by their desire for revenge and resolution.

The series is brutal and graphic in its depiction of the horrors of the Western expansion and the unbelievable toll taken on the native people and settlers. Evil and menace stretch to the horizon. But Cornelia and Eli try to find peace where they might -- outsmarting many truly despicable characters -- but the prospect of finding lasting peace grows dimmer as the series progresses.

Startlingly good.

Misery (1990)

 

In Rob Reiner's film adaptation of Stephen King's Misery (1990), Oscar-winner Kathy Bates' lunatic fan Annie Wilkes rescues her favorite author, Paul Sheldon (James Caan), from a car wreck in her snowy Colorado town.

While he recuperates in her guest room, Annie, a nurse, insists Paul continue his series of romance novels featuring Misery Chastain, whom he intends to kill off.

Paul isn't thrilled by the prospect of continuing the series, but fears Annie is unstable and might harm him if he objects. He agrees but tries to find a way to get help while she is out of the house one day. When Annie discovers Paul's tried to get away, she takes a sledgehammer to his ankles, hobbling him.

When I first saw that scene, I thought it was stomach-turning though clearly animated for maximum visual effect. In the book, Wilkes hacks off Sheldon's foot with an axe and cauterizes the stump with a blowtorch. Reiner chose to dial back the gore. (Good call.)

I didn't fully appreciate the irony of a profanity-eschewing Christian woman swinging a mean hammer. Her most prominent feature -- aside from the modest hairstyle and clothing -- is the gold cross around her neck. How fitting for her to wear a symbol of torture and suffering while she brutalizes and imprisons to get her way.

According to published reports, King's relationship to religion is complicated. Though raised a Methodist and describing himself as a believer, King says he leaves religious certainty to others. He is open to change his mind.

And based on the movie's made from his fiction, I would say King has little tolerance for hypocrisy or those who would use religion to control others. They will eventually get what they deserve. (Remember what happened to Carrie's mother? Ouch!)

I would also say that were Annie Wilkes real and alive today, she would be at home in MAGA "cockadoodie" nation.

Rafe Spall

 

I first noticed British actor Rafe Spall in The Big Short (2015), in which he played the ebulliently optimistic gourmand and stock trader Danny Moses -- one of the few likeable people in that terrific but cynical film.

In Hugo Blick's outstanding Amazon Prime miniseries The English, Spall, son of the celebrated English character actor Timothy Spall, plays the most despicable person among a legion of them as David Melmont, a low-born English "numbers guy" in the employ of British aristocrat and aspiring cattleman in late-19th century Wyoming Thomas Trafford, played by Tom Hughes.

As Melmont, Spall, who like his father mostly plays supporting parts in films, is a snarling, vengeful and diseased cuss whose presence is felt even when he isn't on-screen.

This poisonous figure is given ominous dimensionality through Spall's considerable gifts for inhabiting and enlivening characters. It is difficult to see any of Moses from The Big Short in the terrifying Melmont.

As Melmont, Spall is menacing both when unshaven and draped in a poncho, his grimy face and grim countenance under a dusty bowler hat on the prairie, and when he is shaved and powdered, vested and spatted, hat in hand and walking stick at his side, sitting in the parlor of an estate in the English countryside. In both instances, he is a venomous viper, whose actions ruin multiple lives while enriching himself.

I won't make the obvious comparisons to more contemporary villains.

The Banshees of Inisherin

 

Writer / director Martin McDonagh has a beautiful way of depicting hell on earth.

In his latest film, The Banshees of Inisherin, McDonagh -- who hasn't directed a lot of films but whose work is impactful [Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri; Seven Psychopaths; In Bruges] -- tells of the dismal mundaneness of life on a picturesque but remote Irish island where residents rely on one another for company and diversion -- not always good and not always healthy.

It's 1923, and Pádraic (Colin Ferrell) plans his days around his 2 p.m. appointment to get a pint with his longtime friend Colm (Brendan Gleeson). He is thrown when Colm, a fiddler, rebuffs him, telling Pádraic, who is a simple dairy farmer, to leave him alone, without reason or explanation.

When Pádraic presses for answers, Colm threatens to do himself harm if the other man persists. Pádraic's perplexed woundedness is as apparent as Colm's misery. It's a nightmare scenario that roils everything on the island, which seems to be bound together by predictable routines.

Pádraic's sister, Siobhan, played by Kerry Condon, tries to intervene but with no success, and advice from a perky but pesky lad, Dominic (Barry Keoghan), makes matters worse. All the while, across the channel separating the island from the mainland, the sounds and flares of civil war serve as backdrop.

McDonagh offers a lot for audiences to reflect on as they watch the dissolution of valued human connections. How do we define ourselves and the nature of our relationships?

It's never made absolutely clear why Colm banishes his friend -- he claims Pádraic is too dull and uninspiring for him -- but we wonder if the maudlin musician is depriving himself of something he values greatly to torment himself. For art must come from pain.

If hell is other people, as Sartre famously said, then it also must be their absence.

The Menu

 

To say director Mark Mylod's The Menu is not for every taste would be too cute by half -- but it isn't. I loved it.

A dozen or so high-rollers and a ringer have purchased tickets to an exclusive barrier island restaurant run by the reclusive Chef Slowik (an unnerving Ralph Fiennes), who boasts that he prepares the world for the delectation of his guests. The cost of a ticket is $1,250, which includes transport by ferry boat to the island.

Among the guests are Tyler (Nicholas Hoult), a pretentious foodie fan boy, and his date for the evening, Margot (Anya Taylor-Joy), who may not be who she says she is. But that appears to be true for everything in this picture.

The guests are seated and the multicourse meal begins with Chef introducing each presentation with a loud clap and instructions to the patrons to savor and not, vulgarly, "eat" what he's prepared. It's all exquisite. And Mylod has included graphic elements to describe each dish.

As the evening progresses, it becomes clear that food (or its approximate) is not the only thing on the menu -- one might say, if one were inclined, that the patrons are being served their "just desserts."

It's all delightfully over-the-top and pointed satire about consumerist culture and the vultures who feed on other people's vanity.

The humor is savory, the violence robust and the after-taste smoky.

Bon appetit!

P.S. You might be craving Five Guys after seeing this picture.

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery

 

Mystery fans know that when it comes to detective stories all the pieces matter -- except when they don't.

Extraneous information can be useful as deliberate misdirections and McGuffins, devices that just move the story forward but serve no purpose in solving the case or revealing the killer's identity. Astute viewers can often identify these devices straightaway or soon enough. To my mind, the fewer of these narrative cheats the better -- make everything count, I say. Unless they're handled expertly.

Writer / director Rian Johnson is a master of the telling detail and the deflection; he has the disciplined mind of a computer programmer -- all ones and zeroes, x's and o's triggering responses, reactions and reflection. Watching the swirling pieces fall into place is the joy of watching well-crafted movie mysteries.

In 2019's Knives Out, Johnson assembled a family of exasperatingly privileged whiners and their hirelings in the wake of the death of the patriarch (Christopher Plummer), which the viewer sees executed early in the film and knows it to be a suicide witnessed by the man's nurse (Ana de Armas). So, that death is a brilliant McGuffin used to uncover other nefarious deeds.

To assist the local police (Lakeith Stanfield) in the investigation, Johnson created the delicious, oak-barrel mystery writer Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), a Southern gentleman sleuth not unlike Christie's wood-soaked Hercule Poirot -- courtesy masking craftiness.

One of the reasons to take in Johnson's most-excellent second Knives Out feature, the Netflix-produced Glass Onion, is to see (and hear) Craig's Blanc do his delectable thing, bouncing off of and around a rogues' gallery of, well, exasperatingly privileged hangers-on (Kate Hudson, Dave Bautista, Kathryn Hahn, Leslie Odom Jr.) to a tech giant played by Edward Norton. (I'd forgotten how much I enjoy Norton's work and am reminded he was nominated for an Oscar and won the Golden Globe for his first feature film performance in 1996's Primal Fear.)

In this Swiss clock of a mystery, Johnson takes his story to a Greek island owned by Norton's Miles Bron, who promises a whodunit weekend where his guests must solve the mystery of his own murder. (Spoiler alert: That's the McGuffin.) Johnson has filled each frame of this visually saturated picture with pop culture references and sight gags, some diversionary (Kanye's portrait) and some meaningful (the Mona Lisa). Also at the party is Bron's aggrieved former partner Andi, played by Janelle Monáe, who may or may not be out for revenge.

The picture crackles with wit and intelligence and some howlingly funny set pieces and contrivances. Take a notepad and pencil and play along.

Bones and All

 

The best horror is not actually about the monsters that lurk outside -- in basements, under beds, in attics or in the woods -- but those we carry around with us, inside.

Director Luca Guadagnino's horror / road movie Bones and All is about two young cannibals in '80s America (Reagan can be heard in a radio broadcast). Maren (Taylor Russell) and Lee (Timothée Chalamet) meet in a food store in Indiana and decide to join forces in the joint mission of feeding their unholy craving for human flesh and finding Maren's mother, whom she has never met but believes is living in Minnesota.

Maren's father (Andre Holland) has been alone in protecting her from the authorities and herself, but after she gnaws on a classmate's finger at a sleep over, he exits leaving her with a few bucks and a cassette tape of her backstory, which she's never heard. Lee's family story is darker and more desperate and he only reveals it after he and Maren have endured many trials on their journey. He considers his story shameful.

These two bedraggled young people epitomize the disaffection of addiction, all scraggly deception and wandering. They go from day-to-day trying not to give in to despair.

During a campside meeting with a couple of grungy local eaters (Michael Stuhlbarg and David Gordon Green), Maren and Lee are told of the pinnacle (depth?) of cannibalism, devouring the whole person, bones and all. They are repulsed, and doubly so, when they discover one of the men is a volitional eater, not driven by cravings. Who would choose to do this? They run away.

When Maren is finally united with her mother (an unrecognizable Chloë Sevigny), who has been committed to a psychiatric hospital where she can no longer harm herself or others, the visit doesn't go well, and Maren leaves even more distressed.

Fearful and lost, Maren abandons Lee on the road while he's sleeping but runs into an older eater named Sully (the incomparable Mark Rylance) whom she first encountered shortly after leaving her home in Maryland. Sully's lurking presence -- his attentions are unsought and unwanted -- signals that predators can themselves be prey.

Russell and Chalamet, who along with Stuhlbarg worked with Guadagnino in the celebated 2017 film Call Me By Your Name, are wonderful as Maren and Lee, struggling with legacies of isolation and exclusion, finding little comfort in themselves or the few others like them they encounter, destined to live lives of damage and destruction until they, too, are destroyed. Sounds to me like the horror of addiction -- be the drug heroin or hate.